Hot Lights, Cold Steel

Author: Michael J. Collins
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429903074
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
When Michael Collins decides to become a surgeon, he is totally unprepared for the chaotic life of a resident at a major hospital. A natural overachiever, Collins' success, in college and medical school led to a surgical residency at one of the most respected medical centers in the world, the famed Mayo Clinic. But compared to his fellow residents Collins feels inadequate and unprepared. All too soon, the euphoria of beginning his career as an orthopedic resident gives way to the feeling he is a counterfeit, an imposter who has infiltrated a society of brilliant surgeons. This story of Collins' four-year surgical residency traces his rise from an eager but clueless first-year resident to accomplished Chief Resident in his final year. With unparalleled humor, he recounts the disparity between people's perceptions of a doctor's glamorous life and the real thing: a succession of run down cars that are towed to the junk yard, long weekends moonlighting at rural hospitals, a family that grows larger every year, and a laughable income. Collins' good nature helps him over some of the rough spots but cannot spare him the harsh reality of a doctor's life. Every day he is confronted with decisions that will change people's lives-or end them-forever. A young boy's leg is mangled by a tractor: risk the boy's life to save his leg, or amputate immediately? A woman diagnosed with bone cancer injures her hip: go through a painful hip operation even though she has only months to live? Like a jolt to the system, he is faced with the reality of suffering and death as he struggles to reconcile his idealism and aspiration to heal with the recognition of his own limitations and imperfections. Unflinching and deeply engaging, Hot Lights, Cold Steel is a humane and passionate reminder that doctors are people too. This is a gripping memoir, at times devastating, others triumphant, but always compulsively readable.

Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs

Author: Dr. Michael J. Collins
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429923504
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
It looked for a while like Michael Collins would spend his life breaking concrete and throwing rocks for the Vittorio Scalese Construction Company. He liked the work and he liked the pay. But a chance remark by one of his coworkers made him realize that he wanted to involve himself in something bigger, something more meaningful than crushing rocks and drinking beer. In his acclaimed first memoir, Hot Lights, Cold Steel, Collins wrote passionately about his four-year surgical residency at the prestigious Mayo Clinic. Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs turns back the clock, taking readers from his days as a construction worker to his entry into medical school, expertly infusing his journey to become a doctor with humanity, compassion and humor. From the first time he delivers a baby to being surrounded by death and pain on a daily basis, Collins compellingly writes about how medicine makes him confront, in a very deep and personal way, the nature of God and suffering—and how delicate life can be.

All Bleeding Stops

Author: Michael J Collins
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1525598406
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
What does a doctor do when he thinks his best is not good enough? Matthew Barrett, thirty-one years old and fresh out of residency, is drafted and sent to Vietnam as a combat surgeon in 1967 at the heightof the Vietnam War. Compassionate and sensitive to a fault, he is determined to make a difference but quickly finds his idealism crushed by the pain, suffering, and indifference that surround him. Shamed by his inexperience and tormented by his failures, he slowly unravels. Only the love of Therese Hopkins, a nurse, keeps him from falling apart. But will their love survive the grinding horror of war? Matthew’s journey of redemption takes him from combat surgeon in Vietnam to transplant doctor in Ohio and, finally, to physician in a relief camp in Biafra, exploring how the caring and compassion that draws young people to pursue the healing arts can also sow the seeds of their own destruction, and how love may be the only thing that can finally make all bleeding stop.

Hot Lights, Cold Steel

Author: D P Lyle
Publisher: Medallion Media Group
ISBN: 160542191X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
Forensic criminalist Dub Walker is once again called upon when an old friend enlists his help in finding her 19-year-old daughter. When the bodies of two young women show up in a shallow grave, one of whom is the daughter, Dub is back to work and hard at it. Soon other bodies start turning up in similar graves, and each victim has undergone multiple, highly technical surgical procedures requiring extremely sophisticated equipment. Who would have access to such state-of-the-art instruments and the skill to perform the complex surgeries? The ensuing trail of terror and bodies that leads Dub to Talbert Biomedical—a surgical instrument manufacturing company operated by a business tycoon and a surgeon—is a horrifying breech of ethics and human decency. It's too gruesome to even contemplate what was done to the victims before they died. To catch a killer, Dub has to put himself in their place.

Emergency Doctor

Author: Edward Ziegler
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060595027
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Hundreds of people slam through its doors every day: gun-shot cops, battered kids, drug addicts, and suicides, destitute drunks, homeless people, AIDS sufferers, and accident victims. It's a bizarre parade of humanity looking for help -- in the one place they know they can find it. Welcome to the frontline trenches of medicine: the emergency room of the legendary Bellevue Hospital. Here, an army of doctors and nurses faces the onslaught of young and old, rich and ragged, sick and dying. All day, all night. All year. This is their story -- an around-the-clock drama of the unexpected: a crane falling on a hapless pedestrian; a crazed executive wearing two-thirds of a three-piece suit; a pretty paralegal aide struggling with an on-the-job cocaine overdose; a trauma victim of an East River helicopter crash clinging to life. It's terrifying, tragic, triumphant ... and true.

Trauma

Author: James Cole
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429989173
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
In this pulse-pounding medical memoir, trauma surgeon James Cole takes readers straight into the ER, where anything can and does happen. TRAUMA is Dr. Cole's harrowing account of his life spent in the ER and on the battlegrounds, fighting to save lives. In addition to his gripping stories of treating victims of gunshot wounds, stabbings, attempted suicides, flesh-eating bacteria, car crashes, industrial accidents, murder, and war, the book also covers the years during Cole's residency training when he was faced with 120-hour work weeks, excessive sleep deprivation, and the pressures of having to manage people dying of traumatic injury, often with little support. Unlike the authors of other medical memoirs, Cole trained to be a surgeon in the military and served as a physician member of a Marine Corps reconnaissance unit, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), and on a Navy Reserve SEAL team. From treating war casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq to his experiences as a civilian trauma surgeon treating alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, and the mentally deranged, TRAUMA is an intense look at one man's commitment to his country and to those most desperately in need of aid.

We Are All the Same

Author: Jim Wooten
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143035991
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
"Wooten has pulled off something close to miraculous... and touched the face of HIV/AIDS with compassion and humanity. —Alexandra Fuller, Chicago Tribune "This is a book not to be missed." —People "Amazing and tender... in this special book [Wooten] brings home the tragedy of AIDS." —Liz Smith, New York Post "Wooten rightly disregards journalistic distance and writes himself into the work, making it read like a contemplative literary memoir." —Time Out New York

My Battle of Algiers

Author: Ted Morgan
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061205761
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
In My Battle of Algiers, eminent historian and biographer Ted Morgan recounts his experiences in the savage Algerian War. In 1956, Morgan was drafted into the French Army and was sent thousands of miles overseas to help quell the Algerian uprising. Once there, he witnessed—and became involved in—unimaginable barbarism that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage Books
ISBN: 0307386457
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity

Bad Monkey

Author: Carl Hiaasen
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 0385350074
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Coming as an Apple Original series from Ted Lasso Executive Producer Bill Lawrence and starring Vince Vaughn • A wickedly funny novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Squeeze Me in which the greedy, the corrupt, and the degraders of what’s left of pristine Florida—now, of the Bahamas as well—get their comeuppance. “[A] comedic marvel … [Hiaasen] hasn’t written a novel this funny since Skinny Dip.”—The New York Times Andrew Yancy—late of the Miami Police and soon-to-be-late of the Monroe County sheriff’s office—has a human arm in his freezer. There’s a logical (Hiaasenian) explanation for that, but not for how and why it parted from its shadowy owner. Yancy thinks the boating-accident/shark-luncheon explanation is full of holes, and if he can prove murder, the sheriff might rescue him from his grisly Health Inspector gig (it’s not called the roach patrol for nothing). But first—this being Hiaasen country—Yancy must negotiate an obstacle course of wildly unpredictable events with a crew of even more wildly unpredictable characters, including his just-ex lover, a hot-blooded fugitive from Kansas; the twitchy widow of the frozen arm; two avariciously optimistic real-estate speculators; the Bahamian voodoo witch known as the Dragon Queen, whose suitors are blinded unto death by her peculiar charms; Yancy’s new true love, a kinky coroner; and the eponymous bad monkey, who with hilarious aplomb earns his place among Carl Hiaasen’s greatest characters.